The origins of Target’s corporate responsibility philosophy began many years ago out of a modest-sized department store called Dayton’s Dry Goods. At that time, our founder, George Draper Dayton, proclaimed that our business must maintain “the higher ground of stewardship.” It was at that moment when Target’s reputation for dependable merchandise, fair business practices, and a generous spirit of giving was born. Ever since then, we’ve taken that philosophy and expanded on it—we not only believe we must maintain “the higher ground of stewardship,” but we also believe we are Here for Good.

For Target, being Here for Good goes beyond giving our guests the highest quality products for a fair price. It means we believe in providing the tools and resources for our team to lead healthy lives and enjoy fulfilling careers, demanding safe working conditions and ethical practices from our vendors around the world and paying attention to the impact our business has on the environment by making sustainability commitments we can keep. Ultimately, it means continuing our investments in communities. Ever since 1946, we’ve given 5 percent of our pretax profits back to the community. Today, our 5 perecent giving program invests more than $3 million a week in hundreds of communities throughout America.

We are extremely proud of our hard-earned reputation of dependability, fairness, and generosity—and every one of Target’s 355,000 team members work hard to make sure we never take it for granted. As part of my participation at the 2011 International Corporate Citizenship Conference, I presented some rules that every organization can use to be mindful of their reputation—rules that may be unconventional to some.

A New Reality

I proposed these rules because, as leaders and practitioners of corporate responsibility and citizenship, we face a new reality. We now live in the age where a single, misplaced Tweet has the potential to set off an incredibly destructive chain of events—a chain of events that can vanquish any organization’s hard-earned name and reputation.

If you remain unconvinced, just imagine the following scenario:

From the moment you began reading this article, every email that your organization has on a server somewhere—email messages from your CEO, senior management, personal and confidential messages—are showing up in chat rooms, message boards, and websites all over the Internet and piquing the interest of every news organization in the world.

Seems pretty far-fetched doesn’t it?

It’s not. It recently happened to HBGary Federal, an information security firm working with the FBI to investigate the pro-Wiki Leaks group “Anonymous.” Incidents like these are becoming the new norm and organizations can no longer control their corporate reputation or image the way they’ve done so in the past.

Whether its entities like WikiLeaks or Anonymous or hidden-camera tactics like those used against ACORN and National Public Radio, external forces are now playing a role in defining what organizations represent to the world like never before. Because of these forces, we now live in a world that forces radical transparency.

Adapting with Defense

Maneuvering in this new world still requires everyone to be part of defining their reputation in the traditional ways. It’s all about pitching in and making a good name for your organization. It’s what makes for a good offensive posture in this new world. But when good deeds and responsible stewardship aren’t enough, adding a defensive element to your citizenship strategy may just do the trick and help organizations to adapt.

This may seem counterintuitive, but I firmly believe incorporating a defensive element into corporate citizenship can help identify vulnerabilities, avoid surprises, and prepare organizations for the day they become the subject of scrutiny.

So where do you begin? How can your organization create this defensive strategy? One way to start is by applying four rules to your corporate citizenship framework.

RULE #1 – Assume Nothing Is Confidential

How many people that you work with believe confidentiality is achieved by merely looking around them to see who is nearby? Or mistakenly believe that placing a “do not forward restriction” on an e-mail assures secrecy? Today, confidentiality cannot be taken for granted because, with every technology advance promising security and confidentiality, there have been equal advances in covert surveillance and electronic intrusion. Therefore, it pays to be cautious. In fact, assume nothing is confidential.

RULE #2 – Find Your Halos

Halo effects are tricky things and are unavoidable. When a person establishes a long history of positive contributions to friends and neighbors, he or she creates a reputation of goodwill—one that may or may not be true upon inspection. The same is true for organizations.

For example, an organization can create a halo effect based on its giving practices. If an organization donates heavily to Kids’ causes, then subsequently in the mind of the public, your business is Kid friendly and not participating in practices that may harm children—hopefully this is the case, but these actions can be interpreted broadly and one misstep or misinterpreted business practice can create challenges.

Thus, in order to avoid facing this realization in the public square, determine what halos your organization has already. Make a list, evaluate their risk, decide how to handle them, and do it soon. Remember rule #1—assume nothing is confidential—including your halos.

RULE #3 – Discover Your External Stressors

External stressors are the opposite of halos. They are the unintended, negatively perceived impacts that result from doing business. For example, most retail businesses rely on providing open and public access to property, parking lots, and buildings in order to attract consumers who will hopefully spend money in their stores. But doing this also creates external stressors. With public access to property, poorly lighted parking lots, expensive merchandise, and a high volume of pedestrian traffic comes enticement—for shoplifting, car accidents and car thefts. These, in turn, cause external stressors on law enforcement to respond, patrol and react to the crime occurring on the property of a retail store.

At Target, we are aware of the external stressors we create for law enforcement and the resource we can be for public safety. To address this, we help create extensive public safety partnerships to strengthen neighborhoods across the country, including:

• Partnering with law enforcement ahead of problems and building relationships.
• Sponsoring safety awareness and education activities in our communities.
• Using our own resources to assist law enforcement, wherever possible.
• And using our expertise to provide a resource to public safety officials, both law enforcement and emergency management.

To find the external stressors in your organization, you’ll need to dig into your business model and identify the burdens you may place on others that aren’t part of your extended business operations—places where what you do may send the wrong signal and leave your hard-earned reputation vulnerable. When you find them, figure out how to minimize or eliminate them or identify ways you can make up for them.

RULE #4 – Know Your Reputation

Right or wrong, a good or bad reputation will play a role in any organization’s ability to do business. In short, your reputation matters. And, ultimately, this is probably the hardest rule for organizations to follow. When an organization’s image is threatened, executives often become distracted with arguing about who is right and wrong versus trying to figure out how the organization’s reputation may influence the outcome.

We saw this at Target, but we learned from it.

The influence of our reputation came to light after our highly publicized proxy contest in 2009. It was then we discovered how our superior reputation with our long-term investors secured votes in our favor.

And rather than rest on the laurels that performance had afforded us, we immediately sought to understand the specific drivers of our reputation across stakeholders and then developed specific reputation-based strategies, and we continue this practice to this day.

Learning your organization’s true reputation is difficult. It often requires confronting uncomfortable issues and asking tough questions. But if you do, it’ll be worth it because you’ll know what influence it’ll have in nearly every issue you face.

Starting Now

The good news is you can use these rules starting now—it’s never too late. Starting now will help guide your organization in the radically transparent era we now live in and, hopefully, help identify vulnerabilities, avoid surprises, and prepare your organization for the day it becomes the subject of scrutiny. But these rules are only the beginning. Every organization needs to find their “higher ground of stewardship,” and, more importantly, ask themselves if they are planning to be Here for Good.

In an address at the International Corporate Citizenship Conference, Boynton told his audience that to find the kind of great ideas that can change a career, a company or a community they must become full-fledged idea hunters. Co-author with Bill Fischer of the new book “The Idea Hunter: How to Find the Best Ideas and Make Them Happen,” Boynton explained that “idea hunters are learning machines. They are individuals and professionals who are great at finding ideas and they are able to be more innovative and more creative than the rest of the pack.”

Boynton informed his audience that as knowledge professionals they are already idea hunters and he issued a plea that they become great idea hunters. “What you are doing is important,” he remarked, adding that the work of corporate citizenship professionals “is fundamental to how a business school and how universities and how companies should work in the future.”

Boynton explained that ideas are powerful because they drive both economic progress and personal progress. He cited Henry Ford’s mass production of cars as a great example of an idea that drove progress and helped Ford accomplish his mission of creating a car that everyone could afford. Like many great ideas, Boynton noted, the assembly line borrowed from what Ford observed when he saw carcasses being moved around a meat packing plant to remove various cuts of meat. Declaration of Independence, Microsoft’s personal computer, McDonald’s, Google, UPS and FedEx, Best Buy’s Geek Squad, one-size fits all coffee cup lids.

Boynton said an important point to remember about ideas is that “they move, they are available, and they are there for free. If only we can find them.” He added that the best ideas are those that exist elsewhere and are recombined to come up with innovative and creative insights.

Knowledge professionals, Boynton stressed, are more effective with better ideas than with better things or objects, whether they be offices, computers, or any other device they may use in performing their jobs. Idea hunters, he said, are always working to close an idea gap that is much wider than the object gap. Wouldn’t better ideas, he asked, make us more effective at creating CSR or community involvement programs, or getting buy-in within our organization? The idea gap, he contended, is much wider than any object gap.

Boynton said that to become a great idea hunter “you’ve got to know your gig.” This, he explained, means knowing your mission, your job beyond your job description, or what your life is all about professionally. “The gig fuels your hunt for ideas,” he said. “The gig is the compass which you will use to find ideas and discern which are useful and which are not.”

To figure out your gig, Boynton instructed, you need to know what you are passionate about, what are your talents, and determine if there is a market for what you have to offer. “There is a huge market for what you are passionate about,” he told the assembled corporate citizenship professionals. “This is not fad, and this is not fashion.”

Once armed with knowledge of their gig, Boynton said, there are four fundamental components to keep in mind to be a great idea hunter.

• I — Be more interested than interesting. Albert Einstein is a great example of a person succeeding because he was interested, according to Boynton, who quoted him once saying, “I have no special talents, other than the fact I’m passionately curious.” Boynton pointed to Walt Disney as another example of someone so interested in seeking ideas he once dug through his animators’ waste baskets and came up with a discarded drawing of a character. With encouragement from Disney, that character became the iconic Goofy.

• D — Diversify: Avoid the same trail as others take. The dean advised seeking a diverse set of sources for ideas. He talked about how Warren Buffett took inspiration from Ted Williams’ approach to the science of hitting in his approach to investing. Just as Williams focused on swinging at the pitches that gave him the greatest likelihood of getting a hit, Buffett stays within his circle of competence, focusing only on investments in companies he can understand.  “Investing, baseball, what’s the link?” asked Boynton. “The link was everything.” He also cited Thomas Edison, who surrounded himself at Menlo Park with The Muckers, a group of about 40 diverse thinkers from varied backgrounds to set up the “world’s first systematic invention factory.” The inventions they came up with together changed the world.
• E — Exercise your idea muscles: Boynton told of the practice of Buffett’s investment partner, Charles Munger, who “sells himself the best hour of every day to get smarter.” He observed that most successful people aren’t the smartest or the hardest workers. They are learning machines. “They know how to wake up every day a little bit smarter,” said Boynton, who noted that this supports the notion behind idea hunting that behavior trumps IQ. “It’s about every day increasing the probability that you are going to collide with a great idea.” He advised that knowledge professionals should not let work or being busy get in the way of spending time scanning the Internet, talking with individuals from other disciplines or looking in unusual places to find great ideas. “We’ve got to be busy at doing our job and learning and getting new ideas. It has to be part of who we are.”

• A — Hunting ideas requires agility: “It’s not about originality,” said Boynton. Or, as he quoted Picasso, “good artists borrow, great artists steal.” He urged his audience to adopt his zealous commitment to prototyping, with a simple three-step process: 1. Build, 2. Fail 3. Learn. “What’s the byproduct of prototyping?” Boynton asked. “New ideas.”  The ultimate model of harvesting that byproduct, Boynton pointed out, was Edison, who pointed to a pile of garbage when asked what assets made him most successful. It was Edison’s failures, he said, that were his most valuable assets because the byproduct of ideas they generated changed the world.

Putting it all together, Boynton told of the idea hunting by Leonard Bernstein, Jerome Robbins and Stephen Sondheim that created the Tony Award-winning play and Oscar-winning movie, “West Side Story.” He explained how an idea in 1949 that was based on Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” and envisioned as a story of battling Jews and Catholics on the East Side of New York, was adapted to portray the conflict between Puerto Rican gangs and white gangs after Bernstein was inspired by stories of gang conflict in Los Angeles. That story came across as authentic, Boynton explained, because Robbins went out into the slums of New York to get ideas of how gangs really interacted.

“This was not just about art,” he observed. “This was about a commercial success. So they were idea hunters.”

In closing Boynton remarked, “Ideas drive economic progress. Ideas drive your company’s progress.” And most importantly, he added, “Ideas drive personal professional progress.”

What advice did they have for becoming a corporate citizenship star? For one, communication skills are key. People in these leadership positions need to be able to connect with diverse individuals, and to tailor their communication methods to meet those diverse needs. In communicating about corporate citizenship, it is increasingly important to demonstrate the linkage to bottom line business goals.

Making these connections requires a strong grounding not only in citizenship and sustainability issues but also in solid business fundamentals. Stangis recommends getting up to speed quickly on the business of your business. McArthur tells new grads to seek out operational and other internal corporate roles, as more and more corporate citizenship positions are being filled internally. 

In addition to preparing corporate citizenship leaders, Hannan emphasized the role that corporate citizenship experience can play in developing leadership skills among all employees. At KPMG, a manager’s engagement with corporate responsibility issues can have a strong impact on their promotion potential. “Leaders of corporate America are going to come from those that understand the corporate responsibility issues,” she asserted.

So while there may not be an expansive supply of high level corporate citizenship positions, the field is definitely expanding and growing to include the passions and needs of incoming employees. Leadership is required at all levels of the company, and the sooner business schools and HR departments realize this, the better off business and society will both be.

Corporate citizenship as a field has gone through great change even in the past few years. Some years back it would be difficult to find anyone in a company with full-time responsibility for citizenship issues. Now there are new announcements of executive level positions created nearly every week. As time has progressed, and citizenship has become a more serious business concern, the types of leaders recruited have changed. While once specialized outside expertise was needed to manage stakeholder relationships and emerging social and environmental issues, today a career of built-up corporate expertise and internal relationships may be of higher value.

What will be the next trend? Will citizenship become an increasingly senior executive position? Will leadership in citizenship become a critical rung on the career ladder of budding CEOs? Or will more companies opt to make corporate citizenship leaders out of all of their managers, or all of their staff?

There are many factors that will affect the answer to this question. A new kind of young employee is entering the business world today. Several studies have shown millennials to be more interested and engaged in societal issues and challenges. Another trend of the day is known as “social intrapreneurship.” Intrapreneurs are employees within companies who voluntarily go beyond their job requirements to introduce new ideas, processes or products that contribute to the overall goal of corporate citizenship and sustainability. New “CROs” – corporate responsibility officers as they are becoming known – could be drawn from these ranks.

Whether it is ambitious new millennials, or seasoned corporate managers who will take up the torch, we need to consider how to prepare the next cohort of leaders for their critical role in advancing corporate citizenship goals. The Center has identified a set of unique competencies that are required to lead in this area, from enhanced passion and optimism, to savvy systems thinking and influence skills. Universities and business schools in particular are beginning to incorporate some citizenship topics and necessary skills but can we rely on these institutions alone? Some companies have created internal training and awareness programs to bring everyone to a common understanding while turning on light bulbs in the heads of those potential future leaders.

These ideas will be framed from multiple perspectives at our upcoming International Corporate Citizenship Conference in April. Come hear the viewpoint of Maggie McArthur, deputy director of Net Impact, a pioneering nonprofit that is changing business schools and MBAs worldwide. Armed with a fresh MBA and a new CSR role with Mitsubishi International Corporation, Joe Reganato will share his view from a millennial perspective. Also new to her role, Kathy Hopinkah Hannan, managing partner for Diversity and CSR at KPMG, will share a senior perspective as one who has come in to lead CSR from various other leadership positions and industry expertise. Dave Stangis, Campbell Soup’s vice president, CSR, will moderate this panel, guiding the audience toward developing new perspectives on the future of corporate citizenship leadership.

Don’t miss the chance to get in on this conversation about the corporate citizenship leaders of tomorrow and what they’ll need to carry the torch into the future. Learn more about the conference here.

This is starting to feel a little bit like my visit to Argentina in the spring of 2002, right after the unthinkable happened. One of the most prosperous countries on the globe – a can’t-miss poster child for the glories of globalization that at one time fed much of the world – suddenly imploded. The basic securities and infrastructure of Argentine society, things we take for granted as they did, suddenly collapsed. Banks and banking went under, middle class folks in droves lost their homes, and security at every level disintegrated. Sound familiar? Now, I don’t bring this up to frighten or prophesize Armageddon in the United States. I only seek to provide some perspective on the tenuous times that we currently find ourselves in.

In April of 2002 the U.S. Department of State had asked me to spend a week in Argentina at the request of a number of business, government and university groups that wanted to talk about corporate citizenship. I was somewhat stunned that they wanted to talk about this of all things, given the wide spread chaos erupting across the country that I had read about and seen on the nightly news. But as it turned out, it was an amazing time to look at some of our basic assumptions of society and a great time to talk about the roles of business, government and civil society. But more about that in a bit.

In late 2001 and the early part of 2002, the economic situation in Argentina had deteriorated at an unprecedented speed. By the time I arrived, the peso had gone from 3-to-1 to the dollar in January to 1-to-1 in April. The government had frozen bank deposits triggering the collapse of the baking systems. On the streets long lines of very angry people formed each day hoping to get their money out of the bank. “If I see a banker walking down the street,” one particularly upset man told me, “I will punch him in the mouth.” At night you would see middle-class families, who only a few months before had mortgages, rolling out their beds on the street because they had lost their homes. Mobs from the poorer sections of Buenos Aires were looting the supermarkets. Short of war or natural disaster, you really could not imagine a more chaotic scene.

So what I found in my weeklong series of talks and discussions across the country was a fundamental breakdown of the existing social contract. Government officials were blaming the incompetence and greed of bankers and the narrow self interests of the business community. Businesses were pointing their finger at the chronic corruption that defined government, and the civil society was fed up with both sectors who they felt had no commitment to civil and public life.

Since then I have I returned to Argentina a few times, most recently this past December. Not much has really improved. More than five years later, society remains seriously damaged from the unthinkable eruption and it continues to wander, looking for a return to happier days.

As I reflect on this today while we are in the midst of unprecedented and unscripted times, I can’t help but think: Could the unthinkable happen to us. Could our banking system implode and could the Dow go below 1,000, or even lower? Could the housing crisis turn even darker and the so-called toxic assets really pollute the pond we live in?

The truth is we don’t know. We have great faith that our more sophisticated systems would not allow that, but I have to think that not too deep in the recesses of our minds we ponder the unthinkable from time to time. It is just one of those times when it seems anything is possible.

One positive thing I did walk away with from Argentina is a deep appreciation for the tenuousness of the social contract and a much greater appreciation of leadership at all levels. Just as in Argentina, we are in the midst of redefining the role of business and at the same time redefining the role of government. Despite the strong ideological camps that have defined both Wall Street capitalists and Washington politicians, the roles and responsibilities of government and business are being renegotiated. If this dissolves into protracted finger pointing and years of fruitless ideological battles, we may well descend a lot lower and start to resemble the Argentine environment.

Which brings me to my final and perhaps most important insight from my experience in Argentina. At the end of the day it all comes down to leadership. The ability to create a shared vision – and establish a loud voice for that vision – is at the heart of leadership.  And it was abundantly clear that this was in short supply and continues to be to this day in Argentina.

In the midst of rancor we will need exceptional leadership that does more than lean across the aisle. True leadership will require crossing the rigid boundaries of the sectors to cobble together a shared vision. As citizens we have a set of shared values that might have to be dusted off so we can gain the perspective of what lies ahead and what it will take for the courageous leadership essential to rebuilding from the ruins of the current crisis.

I am ultimately a half-full type of guy and will bet on us pulling through. What do you think of our odds?

Just when I begin to think that I am getting a solid handle on corporate citizenship I have some new experience and gain fresh perspective that humbly reminds me we are still looking at citizenship through a glass darkly.

Last week I spent four days in Kingston, Jamaica, working as a volunteer at a group of centers that serve as home for society’s castaways. One center houses a group of 40 severely retarded and disfigured children abandoned at birth. In another live a group of men dying of AIDS and in yet another, a group of older men covered with bed sores who will spend their final days without any family to comfort them. Tough to take, but real in a city where within a two-block area of these centers some 15 people were killed in gunfights during the past month.

In the midst of this gritty environment I reflected on the vast disconnect this has with my life in corporate citizenship. Much of what I – and most who toil in the corporate citizenship arena – do is search for new strategic approaches and new “sustainabilities.” This is a world of strategy and leverage, usually conducted in company headquarters typically located in a community considerably upstream in terms of education, safety, health and job readiness.

Corporate citizenship is about making decisions based on facts and business plans and success is measured by metrics and more data. These efforts rarely involve the names, faces and personal stories of the intended beneficiaries like the people in the ghettos of Kingston. They need baths, shaves, fingernails clipped and diapers changed – not strategy, surveys or business plans. Talk about living in two totally different worlds.

The challenge is to recognize that while most of what we do with corporate citizenship is about working for a better tomorrow, we must consider the needs of today.

The people I visited in Jamaica can still only hope to get something to drink and eat today through the basic charity of others. Unfortunately, I don’t see a wave of economic prosperity heading in their direction. For those in Kingston, learning how to fish is not even an option. Maybe someday they will be the beneficiary of a job-training program or micro financing but today they simply need someone to offer them a fish. No amount of systems change, innovation or strategic philanthropy will be of much use to them right now. Their sole focus is meeting the daily needs for survival.

So sweating away in the realities of Kingston, I couldn’t help but think that in my world of corporate citizenship, where we are immersed in wonderful new innovations of strategic philanthropy, social entrepreneurships, micro financing and the like, the needs of millions of people who are hungry and thirsty today still go unmet.

And thus the crunch. If we were able to magically bring about the strategic system changes and lift the millions of folks out of misery into a modicum of social and economic prosperity, as is happening in large parts of the world, we would then be confronted with the unsustainability of prosperity.

In the regions where hundreds of millions have benefited from globalization and are now part of the “consumptive” class, we are seeing water, oil, rice, grain and other commodities become more scarce and expensive. Might we be faced with cartels on corn, wheat and rice in the same way we have with oil? This gives sustainability a new wrinkle.

All of this serves to remind me that corporate citizenship increasingly has to be looked at not as a series of programs or even simply as a strategy. Rather, it has to be seen as a way by which companies navigate their way and calculate and continuously recalibrate their roles in trying to achieve economic success and at the same time meet the expectations to participate and contribute toward social and environmental sustainability.

Basic human needs and the plight of those millions trying to get through the day or overcome the natural challenges of cyclones in Burma or hurricanes in New Orleans will always be in our face. Using the unique assets of business to find new solutions for the bottom of the pyramid is both the promise and the pride of corporate citizenship.

The global crunch brings up the age-old problems that call for personal charity to relieve the needs of today, along with system change which opens up hope for tomorrow. We can’t ignore either and that is the ultimate crunch. Talk about the challenge of leadership.